Expected more

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Roy Chanslor's screenplay of the John and Ward Hawkins story, "The Saboteurs", is, as we might expect, war-time propaganda concerned with the enemy's attempts to sabotage Californian shipyards. It's now somewhat dated. Worse still, the script is inclined to be too talkative, even though producer Phil Ryan has tried to offset this problem by engaging a first-class cast, including always reliable Pat O'Brien, plus two lovelies in the form of Carole Landis and Ruth Warrick, to do most of the talking. Alas, generally speaking, both Eddie Sutherland's direction and Franz Planer's cinematography are undistinguished. But fortunately, the action scenes have a fair amount of credibility, and there is an adequate climax.

The Secret Command made it into Oscar contention with a nomination for Best Special Effects. Still this World War II flag waver has not worn well over the years.Pat O'Brien who was a former war correspondent and now secret government agent takes a job at a shipyard where his brother Chester Morris is now the hiring boss. O'Brien seems changed to both Morris and Ruth Warrick a girl both of them courted back in the day. Biggest change of all is that O'Brien is married to Carole Landis and has two kids. That does not sound like the rollicking hell raising brother Morris knew back in the day.It's suspected that the Nazis have planted saboteurs at the shipyard and O'Brien's mission is to find out who they are and most important who the ringleader is. He's also getting used to home life with Carole Landis and who wouldn't have a hard time keeping his mind on the mission.A few familiar faces are in the cast in roles suitably comfortable for them. I do confess that the ringleader does turn out to be a surprise.Still the subject of sabotage was covered far better in the Alfred Hitchcock classic Saboteur. It holds up where this one does not.

TCM gave this four stars. It's a 2-1/2 stars film, in my opinion.Pat O'Brien is Sam Gallagher, a U.S. government agent, a step up from his old job as a foreign correspondent. His brother Jeff (Chester Morris) offers him a job working in a shipyard as a pileback. Piles are poles, driven into the soil by a mechanical device to give a foundation to a structure Sam's purpose is to ferret out a group of Nazi spies trying to sabotage the shipyards. To give him a background, Jill McCann (Carole Landis), who is an FBI agent, poses as his wife, and two small war orphans are brought in as his children.Jeff is surprised by all this - okay, he hasn't seen his brother in seven years, but something isn't right. He tells Lea Damoran (Ruth Warrick, his girlfriend who used to be Sam's girlfriend) his thoughts.Sam is able to find out that the yard is going to be blown up the yard while an aircraft carrier is docked. And he begins to learn who the Nazis are in the yard. One problem: His brother's suspicions are drawing too much attention to Sam.Pat O'Brien for me has never made it as a leading man, yet for some reason, every once in a while he was given a lead role. This is a role for Joel McCrea, John Wayne, that ilk: masculine, solid, and, frankly, kind of a chick magnet. I mean, on one side there's gorgeous Carole Landis, and on the other, his old girlfriend who still has feelings for him.The story is only so-so, but the final scenes are quite good. The subplot concerning the war orphans is sweet and probably unnecessary.Carole Landis would be dead only four years later, at the age of 29. I suspect the affair with Harrison was probably the last straw. She was done in Hollywood: she was nearing 30, the cutoff age for actresses back then, there were no more big films thanks to her relationship with Darryl Zanuck ending, she couldn't have children, and at the age of 29, she had already had four husbands. A sad end for a beautiful woman who learned that in Hollywood, you're disposable.

These things generally are more interesting for their social history than the cinematic experience. But that history is hot and heavy here.Its a strange thing to witness, how Hollywood toes the line on perceived social needs, sometimes taking the lead from Washington.The US entered the war with a strategy not based on valor, or military prowess. It was simply based on outproducing the bad guys. We could make stuff faster than they could blow it up. So industrial sabotage was a real worry. We weren't worried about the Japanese because we simply locked up anyone who looked Japanese.It was the Germans who "looked like us," that were the worry.So Hollywod ginned up some stories to fit, and this is probably the best of the bunch. The interesting thing here is how far the Irish had come as the prototype American. Only a few decades before, Irish (with Jews) were considered slime. They were quite literally the "other," the non-American. Its anyone's guess why they rose so quickly. The common theories don't hold much water because we see other groups who behaved much the same way and never achieved the exalted status of the Irish as movie icons. But here we have it in spades: brawling is an honorable, friendly thing. Booze is never mentioned. All the hard working, patriotic, tough souls here are Irish. They win the war with pluck and expect no reward or recognition.Now, that's a story. Incidentally, though the story, sets and action are pure hokum, that acting here is pretty modern and realistic. I think that's related to the Irish story.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.